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The Jovian Trojans

The Jovian Trojans

The Trojans and Greeks are two 600 million-kilometer-long arcs of scattered, icy rock asteroids sharing the orbit of Jupiter. They orbit in the stable L4 and L5 points sixty degrees ahead of and behind the giant planet. Mars and Neptune also have Trojan asteroids, but when someone speaks of, “the Trojans,” they’re
normally talking about the Jovian groups.

Trojans & Greeks

In the early days, L4 asteroids (ahead of Jupiter) are named after Greek heroes of Homer’s Iliad; L5 asteroids (trailing Jupiter) are named after heroes of Troy. Asteroids discovered more recently break the old convention, as there are far more objects in the Trojans than there were characters in the Iliad.

Politically, the Trojans and Greeks may be thought of as a collection of sometimes overlapping neighborhoods whose inhabitants tend to group around particular cultures, factions, and sometimes languages. A neighborhood in the Trojans might span anywhere from 250,000 to 2 million kilometers at its widest point. Within neighborhoods, almost everyone knows one other. Because of the wide dispersion of resources, Trojan habitats tend to be small—from one to two thousand people—and built largely along scum barge or cluster lines (although it is never advisable to refer to someone’s habitat as a scum barge unless they refer to it that way first).

Society & Economy

Although the sheer size of the two regions means a lot of cultural diversity, anarcho-collectivism is a powerful meme here and the reputation economy is prevalent. On one hand, neighborhoods, habitats, and even individuals are expected to be self-sufficient. Unlike the denser Main Belt, the Trojans lack the safety net provided by pervasive transhuman presence.

The ideal Trojan or Greek is a Neo-Renaissance being, incredibly competent in a wide variety of fields. A person who can’t maneuver in zero g; maintain their gear, ship, and hab; and navigate between rocks and habitats can have a tough time surviving.

At the same time, a spirit of cooperation prevails. Bartering services or even gifting them to gain reputation is common. Everyone appreciates a specialist, as long as they’re not specialized at the expense of baseline self-sufficiency.

Prospecting and salvage are major activities in the Trojans, where metals and rare elements are scarce and settlers don’t usually have the economic muscle to import raw materials from elsewhere. However, the Trojans are rich in silicates, volatiles, and carbonaceous materials.

Necessity has led to many innovations in materials science. Beyond the simple problem of raw materials, the widely scatTered habitats of the Trojans have to be wildly inventive on many levels to retain their independence. New robot, morph, and vehicle designs appear all the time, enabling an unusual array of business and leisure activities, like whaling (organizing a flash flotilla to rapidly mine asteroids and comets with erratic orbits as they pass near the Trojans), mekking (simulated—or sometimes real—combat between robotic suits or synthetic morphs on uninhabited asteroids with interesting terrain), and shrining (stealthing up on another habitat and resurfacing it with nanosculpters to create an art object—mostly a scum barge pastime).